Robert Sparrow

So the student's not learning anything, but I

If I am running my students' essays through an AI, I'm not giving my students the attention and respect they deserve.

And that relationship with a teacher is really important in the classroom.

And there is a real risk that that will disappear because, yes, it will just be

One machine writes the essay, another machine marks the essay, and nobody is developing the skill set that is required to be a good researcher or a good citizen.

The first thing I would do would be to point out how many times we've heard that story before.

People said that about the MOOCs, the online courses.

People said that about Open University when it used to run on television.

You can say that about correspondence courses.

You could make all the textbooks free and people could teach themselves.

So I would take that more seriously if universities had a better record

of really trying to make education universally accessible.

The other thing that's going on here is people will have access to something.

They will have access to an AI tutor, and some people may well be able to teach themselves, which is what will be going on.

They're using the feedback

from the AI.

Again, some people have always been able to teach themselves skills by reading books or watching YouTube videos, but what they will be getting is not an education of the sort that I got, for instance, when I was in a classroom with professors who talked to me and meant what they said.

So

You might make something universally available, but it is not going to be the education of the sort that universities pretend that they offer to students who are actually in the classroom.

It's actually the status of the outputs of